KU Community Cluster

The KU Community Cluster utilizes the condo model to bring together hardware purchased from different researchers into a single heterogenous cluster. This allows participating researchers to have dedicated use of their purchased nodes, or they may run larger computing jobs by sharing idle nodes owned by other researchers. The main benefit is access to a much larger cluster than would typically be available to a single research group.

The cluster hardware and software is administered by CRC staff. This removes the need for postdocs or graduate students from maintaining your computing system. CRC staff also assists users with any problems they may have using the cluster and helps new users by conducting training sessions and one on one sessions.

Bi-annual purchases will be done for fall and spring semesters dependent on funding. One time purchases can be facilitated, but volume discounts may not be achieved, increasing the price of the hardware.

At this time, you must be an owner of hardware in the KU Community Cluster or be sponsored by an owner group within the cluster to gain access. There is no free partition of the cluster and we currently do not have a rate charge of core hours.

Purchase

CRC offers a Standard Compute Unit (SCU). A SCU is defined as:

• Dual Intel Xeon 6240R CPU (48 cores @ 2.4GHz)
• 192GB 2933MHz DDR memory
• with or without EDR (100Gb/s) Infiniband
• Gigabit (1Gb/s) Ethernet 
• 1TB HDD 7.2K
• 5 Year NBD Hardware Warranty

On top of the base SCU, in the past we have also offered:

• SCU w/ 384GB 
• SCU w/ 768GB
• SCU w/ SSDs
• SCU w/ (4) V100 GPUs
• SCU w/ (2) V100 GPUs
• SCU w/ Quadro RTX 6000 GPUs

All owner groups will receive 1TB of $WORK storage for free. Any additional space of $WORK can be purchased for $100 per TB per year. Invoices for storage will be sent 1 year after the storage's start date.